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Discovered in September of 1999, asteroid 101955 Bennu is a 500-meter (1,640 foot) asteroid that crosses Earth’s orbit once every six years. Because it has been observed for 17 years, astronomers have been able to plot its orbit very accurately, and have found that it will make a series of extremely close passes to the Earth between 2169 and 2199, but they calculate that the chance of an impact is only 1-in-2,700.

Unfortunately, this possibility of an impact has fueled the circulation of a great deal of misinformation on the internet, with most articles illustrating a civilization-ending impact to take place in 2135, with the equivalent energy of 3 billion tons of TNT — but this figure appears to be grossly erroneous.
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Crop formations have all but disappeared from the public mind, and with them the chance that they offered to restore our sense of wonder about the world around us. This has happened not only because of the frantic debunking of the early years, but more recently because of the proliferation of hoaxed formations made by artists on behalf of farmers hoping to charge admission and tour companies eager to bring in busloads of tourists.

What is worse, after the death of Dr. William C. Levengood, the biologist whose study methodology was easily able to determine which were hoaxed and which were genuine mysteries, there is nobody to keep the circlemakers honest.read more

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Speaking at the Annual International Conference on Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures in New York, professor Alexi Samsonovich, from Moscow’s National Research Nuclear University Cybernetics Department, stated that Russian researchers are on the verge of a major breakthrough in AI. But Samsonovich feels this breakthrough won’t necessarily be measurable in terms of artificial consciousness — we can’t even prove that humans are conscious, let alone an entity that might be as alien as AI — but rather that true advancement in AI would be seen in terms of AE: artificial emotions.
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